Status Updates From Omoo: A Narrative of Advent...

Melville ends with some insights into the Tahitian monarchy’s court and ultimately ships off, leaving fictional friend Doctor Long Ghost in his devil-may-care indolence among the Tahitians. I’m not sad to see him left; he is a merry prankster but I wonder whether he is a pastiche of Melville’s worst impulses, distancing the author from less gentlemanly conduct. Not that he didn’t have romance in Typee.

Melville and Long Ghost leave their potato farm to wander toward a whaling ship that is docked in another part of the island. This takes them past a few interesting oddities, like a Tahitian bootlegger. There is also a sort of exotic dance that he describes that he apparently witnessed on Typee, though it’s attributed here to a fictional Tahitian village.

Melville and Long Ghost work on a potato farm on another island with a Yankee and a Londoner. They goof off, hunting, and Melville gives us a bit of the idea of how commerce in the Society Islands goes on. There is something in the story that bemoans the “indolence” of the natives, but I am tempering this with Melville’s subtext that life on Tahiti was well enough prior to foreign powers.

Melville in this case is in the position, having spent a not insignificant amount of time among the more or less untouched Typee, to evaluate what western culture has done to the Tahitians. This section includes a more sympathetic account of the activities or missionaries, the subtext of which is more in alignment with his scathing remarks in Typee, grounded in the superficialities of their Christian “conversion”

The mutinous crew is imprisoned on a French warship before being moved far inland in Tahiti, under the care of the islanders. Melville’s observations on personal experiences with the Tahitians are dovetailed with extracts from historic texts that he borrowed from, giving this story a very semi-educational view of French Polynesia. It’s a bit different, too, from Typee.

More sea shenanigans. This section encompasses the voyage to Tahiti once the captain’s abscess on his taint goes south and the generally mutinous feeling of the sailors who don’t want to be stuck sailing on the boat under the first mate, who they don’t really like. This includes the more or less unsympathetic ear of the British counsel, who is on familiar terms with the despised captain.

There is a lot of nautical jargon that William Hope Hodgson used when writing his stories that I only sort of grasped. Melville, in illustrating the sailing jaunt that dominates the first part of this story, does some of the same thing, but this story is aided by copious footnotes that help to explain some things that I could never have grasped from the narrative as well as more esoteric references.